New Theme Available

[VincentF]

Hi all!

These past few days the forum moved its way to PHPBB, losing a bit of the charm of the previous design.
PHPBB's vanilla theme is good, although a bit old-school, but to give this forum a bit of its own identity, we worked on a custom theme (based off of "Flat Style" by Ian Bradley).

flat-style-index.png (140.81 KiB) Viewed 7780 times

This theme is available through your User Control Panel (under the dropdown on your username), then Board Preferences, and finally change the Board Style to "Flat 8-Bit".

flat-style-change-step1.png (35.28 KiB) Viewed 7782 times

flat-style-change-step2.png (80.35 KiB) Viewed 7782 times

We're planning to set this theme as the default once we got enough feedback on it. Feel free to try it out and report anything about it, we're looking to improve it over time so any suggestion is welcome!

Thank you for your attention,

[Main Administrator]

We're planning to set this theme as the default once we got enough feedback on it. Feel free to try it out and report anything about it, we're looking to improve it over time so any suggestion is welcome!

Just to clarify... we don't plan to force anyone over to the new theme.

Users creating new accounts, after we make this the default, will get the new look. Existing users will have to select it in their user CP.

We'd like to thank Vincent for the work he's put in to this. He's done a great job creating icons, working on the CSS, and making the board look like modern, but retro at the same time.

[AndyMt]

I like the new theme - mostly. The only exception being the icons in front of the threads and categories (sorry...). They are far too blocky and 3d compared to everything else which is flat. Maybe that's just me ;-)...
Everything else - gorgeous!

[VincentF]

I like the new theme - mostly. The only exception being the icons in front of the threads and categories (sorry...). They are far too blocky and 3d compared to everything else which is flat. Maybe that's just me ...
Everything else - gorgeous!

No problem about that, I had a pretty hard time figuring out what to draw for these icons, and couldn't think of anything else. The only rule I wanted to keep for these is using pixel art, to give an overall 8-bit feel to the forums, plus the flat part.

If you got any suggestion on what to do for these icons feel free to suggest ideas, maybe we can figure out a better icon set this way! (and 40+ forum/topic icons to redraw, but it's okay I like to mess that around)

[AndyMt]

I have some idea. I'll put up some suggestion and post it here. And I would help with updating the icons once a style is found.

[desertfish]

Is it possible to add those "view the latest post" links also to the other pages (unread posts, active posts, new posts) ?
They're only visible on the main page now.

[VincentF]

Is it possible to add those "view the latest post" links also to the other pages (unread posts, active posts, new posts) ?
They're only visible on the main page now.

Yes, I noticed that too, thanks for the report.
I changed the template file to fix that issue, now the theme needs to be rebuilt from the admin panel to apply those changes. I'll report back once it's applied.

[Cyber]

I want to ask for some understaing of things.
Why do you need this "view the latest post" feature so much? It links to literally last post in thread, not last unread. What is the use case for this feature?

[VincentF]

I'll report back once it's applied.

Done

[AndyMt]

So I tried something with the icons... but if pixel-art look is a requirement, then the only thing I would change is to remove the 3d-look and maybe reduce contrast for the borders. Can't post bitmaps in this topic, but I can send a PM if you like?

I also have a suggestion for the blue icons right in front of the topic titles, which are "hanging" considerably.
Add the following to the style a.topictitle:
vertical-align: middle;